Ok, not really, but this lady certainly seized her 15 minutes rather nicely. So I read it, and would recommend you do too, because there is going to be a lot of water cooler talk this week, and this needs to be a part of it. People are going to be focusing on the prepper and gun-owner angles pretty closely, but this speaks to something much more significant, if we want to avoid more shootings.

If you wondered why these shooters are usually from "affluent" families, I think this begins to answer it. Pay particular attention to the part where she says (paraphrasing), "You don't want to send a 13 year-old to prison, who loves Harry Potter..." etc. Her son is too much to handle...she wants to have him committed...but in our litigious society, it's too hard to do unless there's a criminal record...but if you're affluent and have health benefits that cover mental health treatment...you can afford to keep them on drugs and out of the prison and/or institution.

I can't help but wonder what happens when Obamacare makes benefits available to everyone...and a lot more people are going to have access to the "expensive drugs" option.

While you are right to point this out the real issue lies much deeper.

Here is a mother who sees her son as having a mental illness. There's just one problem - he doesn't.

Her fears and concerns are real, but her actions are off. He should not be in a locked down pysch ward, he should be on the exam table with a neurologist (EEG, CAT scan, MRI scan, etc.).

This is a neurological issue not a psychological issue.

There is an ongoing fight between the psychiatric field and the rest of the medical field to pull many mental health diseases out of the DSM series of texts. We can show the physical changes in the brain that are aligned with these conditions - conditions we can treat through rehabilitation (and perhaps the CORRECT drug), but rather these poor souls are left at the hands of psychiatrists who use psychotropic drugs to treat the neurological problems.

This is symptomological treatment at best - it is assault at worst.

An example -

If I wake with a head ache, a fever, and aching joints and I call my doctor - he says 'take two aspirin and go back to bed.' I follow that advise - waking a few hours later feeling much improved - head ache gone, fever down, aches improved.

One would think I have a good physician.

But what if he missed a nasty cut on my arm? Infected, red swollen, oozing discolored puss??

Not an aspirin but and antibiotic was needed - is he still a good doctor??

He is treating a SYMPTOM not the causative agent.

Same thing with all these psychotropic drugs given to kids with neurological problems...

Mental illness is a serious, costly problem. As many of you recall, my brother age 16 commited suicide. Most likely he was suffering from Bi-polar disorder. Several of my extended family members have it and were diagnosed properly due to my brother's unfortunate demise. To make a long story short, the medications to keep my cousins functional cost around $200 a month on insurance and $1000 a month without insurance. They need monthly/Bi-weekly psychiatric checks that are $100 dollars a pop not covered by insurance. Please write your congressman and make a difference in someone's life. These individuals, like diabetics, need this medication. Thank you. Kim

Mental illness is the issue, but no one wants to face the fact or the cost of incarcerating these wacko's from the time there children until there dead of old age. Where will we put them? There are very few mental institutions around any longer able to take the multitudes of these nut jobs. When I was in college I majored in Special Education, and then circa 1970 it was estimated that 15+ percent of the population had some type of mental illness serious enough to be confined. And with children it's not difficult to ascertain if they have psychological problems. There are many keys to focus in on. But, what do you do with them once the problem is discovered (neurological or psychological). Some issues just can't be treated.

It's really all about the money, just like prisons. How much are we as citizens willing to pay to solve this problem?

You want to see it in action.Drive a school Bus.The society pushing to MAIN stream everyone isn't working.Many times drivers and the other children on the bus are put at RISK main streaming those who need special attention.A bus driver has roughly 72 children when full,putting one of these mentally challenged children on the bus causes undue risk.You all see the nut cases that drive cars using cell phones and worse while driving.Compound that with a mentally challenged student on the bus also really starts overtasking the driver trying to drive defensively and carefully.I remember when I was in school they had special Ed. classes.We didn't main stream everyone for a reason back then,it should be reinstituted.It would be a start.

Before we get too far down the road in discussions about mental illness, we need to keep in mind that Autism and Asperger's Syndrome, are developmental disorders, not related to mental illnesses.

Autism, as well as Asperger's Syndrome, both have a broad spectrum of manifestations. Before the late 1980's Autism was thought to be "Rain Man" in nature, and little was understood about its nature.

Asperger's Syndrome was generally unknown until the mid-1990's. It was originally identified in 1944, by the Austrian psychologist whose name is attached to the condition. It remained an unknown for almost fifty years.

Autistics have a range of development, from near total inward facing, to mildly dysfunctional.

Within the autism spectrum, Asperger's Syndrome brings its own set of definitions. All people who have Asperger's are autistic, but all autistics do not have Asperger's.

My son was born in 1972. From the age of 2.5 years he was able to write, could solve basic linear equations, and demonstrated remarkable mathematical skill levels, far in advance of his age.

As parents, we were nearly in awe. We thought our son was probably a math prodigy, and probably a genius (setting aside the usual parental maxims). His memory bordered (still does) on savant proportions. He doesn't forget anything.

However, apparently unrelated issues (at least to us) surfaced. He was deathly afraid of loud noises (fireworks, sirens, etc.). He didn't adapt well when we moved into a new home. We thought he would outgrow these. He was also clumsy, and didn't do well on athletic movement.

We enrolled him in a traditional school, where we thought he would excel. Instead, he was miserable. His teacher mentally abused him, and nearly destroyed what social skills he did have. It wasn't until a school psychologist intervened that we found he had "an undetermined psychological problem (their words)". This finding was buttressed by two other psychologists.

We went through the individual education planning, and finally got him mainstreamed for his secondary education. It wasn't until 1990, that separate psychological and psychiatric evaluations confirmed that he was autistic. He was intensely counseled, and we've attempted to keep that counseling reinforced.

Later on, after a huge replapse, my digging and his subsequent diagnosis, revealed Asperger's Syndrome.

Autistics do have mental illnesses, but they are unrelated to the autism. The developmental problems and mental illnesses aren't inexorably linked, but they often happen together. They have depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses; but each has to be treated separately.

Thanks for your patience. I know this post runs long, but autism is an extremely complex subject, and not given to a few words in a dialogue.

Society is a much more stressful and complicated place to survive in these days compared to the past..and the kids raised in the last 25years are prepared much less to deal with it...lack of parenting, lack of faith based morals and lack of mentoring...any parent who who thinks a Xbox is a suitable babysitter/ educational tool is unworthy of having kids

Liberal Lawyers, the ACLU, a left leaning Supreme Court, an entertainment industry (on all levels) that just loves pushing the envelope, the break down and attack on the once normal family unit and church, psychs telling us that every thing goes and there is no right or wrong, parents doing drugs and screwing with their unborn kids, etc, etc, etc.....

AND OUR PARENTS CARED ENOUGH TO TEACH US BETTER! AND A LOT OF OTHER THINGS that may not be politically correct to say and being in mind that "BIG BROTHER" is probably monitoring this site I'll leave it at that! This kid was

Things like this did happen years ago, remember the Texas tower shooting.
That being said, the fact is that over the last 35 years the number of mental institutions has droped from about 120,000 insitutions nationally to about 5,000 currently. The reasons of course money, the federal and state goverments decided that they would phase out payments to these institutions thus forcing them out of buisness. The results are many of these mentally ill people are in mainstream society medicated hopefully, but probably not. People are unable access physchaitric services due to the high cost of, limititation in health insurance coverage, and high cost of medication as well. The important issue that is going to be oppressed is the killer and his psycotic homicidal behavior. Look at the last several mass murders most all had psychiatric illnesses, but that will not be the issue, the focus will he high capacity magazines.
The focus should be determining what caused these people to kill, identitfy their problems, identify people in society today and treat so they are not a threat to society and themselves.
IMO this situation could have been avoided if the mother had sought the appropriate care or treatment for her son and did not expose him to firearms.

My heart goes out to anyone who is dealing with someone with a brain chemistry disorder. This stuff is cruel and relentless. The leftists who took over the mental system have destroyed it like they destroy everything they touch.

I suspect the only reason Lanza and the Batman shooter had "no criminal record" until they pulled the trigger, is that their affluent, softie mommies didn't have the heart to turn them in for the stuff they had done up to that point (and just about the time one of them started to get up the balls to do something about it - now she's dead).

I wonder if that's why you don't see these shooters coming from poor families. They can't afford to keep their problem children in a zombie-like state with expensive psychotropic drugs for the first half of their lives...so, when the kid goes off the deep end, they go to jail. Where, incidentally, they can't go shoot up a school like the rich, drugged-up kid.

But with Obama care, poor families will be able to afford those drugs. And America, you ain't seen nothin' yet, because there's at least one of these kids in EVERY COMMUNITY, and when we expand access to that stuff...Katy bar the door. For the good of society, we had better find a way to either get these kids committed...or locked up in jail, because keeping them out in society on their own recognizance in a drugged-up state, with only their mommies to monitor usage of their meds, is a 20-year psychiatric experiment we have been conducting that doesn't seem to be working.

This "national psychiatric experiment" that has been performed in America, one prescription at a time, has resulted in a lot of innocent people being killed. I see it as no different than the Army conducting nerve agent tests on soldiers, only it's decentralized. There's nobody at the helm, overseeing this practice and its effects on society. Access to these drugs is controlled by the same people who hand out blue "handicapped" placards for people to put in their car windows so they can get a prime parking spot. There isn't sufficient oversight.

How many more have to die? I see Mental Health Care as being like a Titanic, where Gun Control is like a little speedboat. The speedboat turns quickly, and makes everybody feel good. But fixing Mental Health is going to be a much slower process. It's going to take a lot of tugboats all lined up on one side of that ship, pushing the same direction, to get it to turn. And looking at the media response to Newtown so far, I think it's going to get a whole lot worse, before people start to figure it out.

Get ready for more dead kids. Bet on it. Right now, one of these ticking bombs lives right down the street from you. And the only two parties overseeing the danger he represents to society, is his over-stressed Mom and some pill-pushing doctor.

The school system doesn't help. In my county they have different levels of ED (emotionally disturbed). The mild cases remain in the High School and are taught by an ED specialist. The severe cases get shipped off to another school. I am not talking about special education. I am talking about the mentally ill. These kids ALL need to go to the "other" school. They get labelled and outcast in the high school only adding to the problem. My kids are afraid of them...that they are going to snap any minute. This creates a hostile learning environment for all involved. When they are at the school for the ED they at least make friends and don't feel outcast. This system works...but what bothers me is that not all the teachers are ED specialists. They also need a psychiatrist on staff in my opinion to be able to recognize if their meds are not balanced. This mentally ill bashing is disturbing to me. Not all need to be locked up...Kim